The News from Newport News

shipyard opened. “It was my original intention to start a ?shipyard plant in the best location in the world,” reads a quote from Huntington on one wall of the exhibit, “and I suc-ceeded in my purpose. It is right at the gateway to the sea.” That gateway became a huge embarkation point during the world wars as hundreds of thousands of troops shipped off to Europe. They were welcomed home to the city’s waterfront by a victory arch, built in the style of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The museum’s most compelling feature for me (hardly surprising, since I’ve written a book on the subject) is the?Monitor Center, dedicated to that historic clash of experimental ironclads, the Monitor and Virginia. This sprawling million permanent exhibit presides over not only a full-scale exterior model of the Monitor, but also actual parts of it, plucked from the bottom of the Atlantic beginning